Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon. The reason for this late activity was very easy to understand, too, once one realized that Hogarty's clientele--especially that of his Monday mornings--was composed quite entirely of that type of leisurely young man who rarely pointed the nose of his tub-seated raceabout below Forty-second Street, except for the benefits of a few rather desultory rounds under Hogarty's tutelage, a shocking plunge beneath an icy shower, and the all pervading sense of physical well-being resultant upon a half hour's kneading of none too firm muscles on the marble slabs. It was like Jesse Hogarty--or Flash Hogarty, as he had been styled by the sporting reporters of the saffron dailies ten years back, when it was said that he could hit faster and harder out of a clinch than any lightweight who ever stood in canvas shoes--to refuse to transfer his place to some locality a bit nearer Fifty-seventh Street, even when it chanced, as it did with every passing year, that he drew his patrons--at an alarmingly high rate per patron--almost entirely from far uptown. "This isn't a turkish bath," Flash Hogarty was accustomed to answer such importunities. "If you are just looking for a place to boil out the poison, hunt around a little--take a wide-eyed look or two! There are lots and lots of them. This isn't a turkish bath; it's a gymnasium--a _man's_ gymnasium!" That was his invariable formula, alike to the objections of the youthful, unlimited-of-allowance, more or less hard-living sons that it "spoils the best part of the week, you know, Flash, just running 'way down here," and the equally earnest and far more peevish complaints of the ticker tired, just-a-minute-to-spare fathers that it cost them about five thousand, just to take an hour to work off a few pounds. But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty's calm refusal to consider their arguments--some of the younger men because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked to hear Hogarty's fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse. Hogarty had a way of telling them just how little they actually amounted to, which, no matter how wickedly it cut, never failed to amuse them. The older generation dared do nothing else, even in the face of the ex-lightweight's scathingly sarcastic admiration of their constantly increasing waist-line--or lack of one. For their lines were largely a series of curves exactly opposite to those on which Nature had originally designed them.